Baresark said:
hentropy said:
SnakeoilSage said:
I really don't get the whole "dad's always right" angle. He's former-CIA and he's a concerned father. Of course he's going to have reservations about his daughter going anywhere without an escort. The fact that he's proven right is just grounds for making the movie in the first place.
That last sentence doesn't really make sense. Yeah, a paranoid "I toldya so" macho father-knows-best fantasy is the basis of making the movie, and that's a bad thing. As someone else mentioned above me, rich white tourists are pretty much the people human traffickers avoid like the plague, because CNN goes DEFCON-1 whenever a pretty white American sniffles overseas. It's not a movie about the realistic danger of human trafficking, it's a transparent power fantasy for men who go apeshit whenever their daughters so much touch a boy without an interview.
The funny thing is Bob basically said that was fine, as most of the movie is just action, and it still holds up on those points and can be fun to watch.
I find your comment off base. Human Trafficking is not color blind. It's not typically blind to money, but the idea is that they no one can really do anything about an American girl in a foreign country disappearing. They are tied to that countries police force, or maybe Interpol gets involved, which doesn't mean much. If this movie took place in America, you may have a point, but you are living in some kind of fantasy to think that "white women" are spared conditions represented in this movie. It may happen less to "white people", but it does happen. Roughly 25% of all the human trafficking in America, for instance, is on white people. Mostly children, and mostly women. No one can argue that race is not tied into it historically, it definitely is, but it's misleading to pretend it's not a problem that can affect you regardless of race.
There have been quite a few high-profile cases of women going overseas, going missing, and it becoming 24-hour news for quite some time. It's extremely rare for tourists of any color to be abducted at all. The plain fact is that police departments in every first world country have a hard time combating human trafficking BECAUSE the people being trafficked are poor, vulnerable, and many times born into the life or went into it at an early age. France is not some dystopian hellhole where tourists disappear and the police throw up their hands and barely investigate the issue. However, when someone is trafficked into France without anyone knowing, sold or transferred or made to work some place underground, it is much more difficult for authorities to combat.
So while the scenario presented might be possible, as many unrealistic things are, it's not really what happens and is presented in such a way for sensational, xenophobic reasons, trying to manipulate someone's feelings into thinking that no one is ever safe unless they're in the loving embrace of daddy America. And literal daddy. Man On Fire at least depicted a scenario that was a legitimate and reasonable fear about rich Americans going to Mexico.
A far as the premise behind the movie, I don't know if it's a bad thing that it's some sort of power fantasy. People enjoy and engage in watching fiction such as this because they know in real life they could not handle having a gun pointed at them, most humans can't, hell most police and soldiers can't which is why they always try to point their gun first. Also... did you just compare a fictional story about a girl being sold into sex trafficking to a guy being unhappy with the new boyfriend because he doesn't approve. Not even in the same zip code.
Ahh, the old "projected comparison" fallacy. Someone should really come up with a cute name for when someone accuses you of comparing two obviously unequal things when that was never implicitly or explicitly implied.
My point was that the
kind of person the movie is meant to appeal to is the kind of person who is overly paranoid of the women or other family in their lif doing things that they see as unwise. See, Mary? You keep dating that guy I don't approve of and you'll end up on some underground catwalk with some middle-easterner staring you up and down!
There's nothing wrong with power fantasies, letting people fantasize about being more powerful or competent than they are. There is something wrong with stoking people's unwarranted fears about this or that for entertainment reasons. I think Red Dawn is a pretty cool movie, I'll watch it if I see it on and of course it has a special place in the zeitgeist, but part of that place is that the war the movie portrays is incredibly absurd in many ways and people recognize that. There's no problem with liking the movie, but it's also important to know that it was a product of a time and a way to turn people's unreasonable fears into entertainment, but it wasn't a joke back then, and could have stoked anti-Communist sentiment even more, if that were possible, and had real-life consequences. I think movies like Taken largely fall in the same category. Nonsensical movies that were products of overblown fears that turned out to actually be enjoyable in some way.